Basic upgrade questions...

[mangoz]

Just doing 5.1.4 to 5.1.5
Upgrade instructions state:
Common Upgrade Issues

After upgrading, all my previous styles and plugins were disabled. This is done on purpose. They are not compatible and trying to use them will cause problems

So what can I expect?

Is everything stored in the database?
When I upgrade are my smilies gone because they are stored in the /images directory?
Are my custom styles gone and I need to upload them again?

These direction don't make me real comfortable that this is going to go well haha.

[Mark.B]

That is generally only applicable on an upgrade from one major version to another, eg vB4 to vB5.
The old vB4 styles are disabled because they simply won't work at all with vB5. They are left in place to enable the admin to grab any colours etc from the old style and put them into a new one.

Going from 5.1.4 to 5.1.5...nothing like that will happen. It should be a short, straightforward upgrade.

Smilies - unless you have overwritten the existing smilies with your own, that will be ok. If you have overwritten them, just don't upload the smilies folder. or re-upload your own ones again afterwards.

Custom styles will be there, some templates MAY require a revert but in most cases changes are automatically merged in.

[mangoz]

I guess what I'm wondering is, since I'm being told "Take all the new folders and overwrite your current folders" - what STUFF will get overwritten?
Are my additional.css items gone for example?

Default smilies are in /images/smilies
My custom ones were put in a /images/smilies/custom folder as I just decided to follow the bulletin folder structure.
When I overwrite my images folder with the new version upload, that custom folder will cease to exist. Are my smilies then gone too without restoring that path?!

Sounds like I need to start calling items from a /public_html/files/smilies folder or something to avoid having these items involved in the upgrade file structure process?

Its all just confusing because no where is it clear what is in the database and what is in the file structure.
I wish I could just upload the zip, navigate to the admin cp and hit upgrade. That'd make a lot more sense and works for many other PHP software suites.

[Wayne Luke]

Templates and CSS are stored in the database. By default, everything is store in the database except smilies. However you do not need to delete your folders when upgrading from 5.1.4 to 5.1.5. Just upload the new files and overwrite all the pre-existing ones. No files that aren't part of vBulletin will be overwritten. Your config.php files will not be overwritten. Overwriting images/smilies will not delete images/smilies/custom. Computers don't work that way.

The only time you need to delete your pre-existing folders is when you upgrade from 4.2.3 or earlier. Nothing in those folder is compatible with vBulletin 5 anyway. Not the CSS, not the templates, not any addons.